NOTE FROM BFP! This post is graciously cross posted from the hard core super swimmer, Anna-Louise. Please give her a warm welcome, and visit her at her LJ!And thank you so much, Anna-Louise, for your amazing thoughts.

and oops, almost forgot to say: If you would like to guest post your (re)thinking walking posts–please email us at rethinkingwalking at gmail dot com!!!

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I needled the ears of my brother and sister-in-law toinight. It’s interesting (and a lot of pressure) to do acupuncture on someone who has never had it done before and is really unfamiliar with the concept.
I’ve been swimming a lot since I became unemployed. When I first started I would swim for 15 laps in 20 minutes. Now I swim 50 laps (way to go jeremy!) in an hour, 5- days a week. In an effort to swim faster than the gaggle of middle aged women in the lanes near me, I’ve also started working out with weights too. Now, my body shape is changing like it really hasn’t since puberty, with my newly gigantic shoulders and upper arms making my clothing fit oddly.

I’ve become one of those imaginary fat people. You know, the ones who say, “I work out two hours a day, five days a week and I’m still fat” and all the fat-haters roll their eyes and insist that all fat people subsist on a diet of America’s Next Top Model and potato chips*. And it’s a stupid argument that doesn’t matter because a strangers health is none of anybody’s business and health should not be used as a yardstick of individual value and morality.

I’d hard to imagine what concept of health seperated from punitive morality would look like, much harder even than a concept of sexuality seperated from puritanism. I can barely fathom would it would be like to think of “healthy living” as something other than a stick to beat on the poor and fat and disabled and female.

But whatever it looks like, I think it’s going to happen here and not the “slow food” and “natural living” meccas of the coasts. It’s going to have to come from geniune radicals instead of hip bohemians.
It looks like non-invasive and non-stigmatizing mental health care for people in the military. It’s what Patrick and Nora are doing here. It’s making sure the most marginalized of women have access to same the birth experience that bobos desire. It what the people who eventually became NADA were trying to create when they were still just young revolutionaries. It’s how Sandorkraut talks about nutrition and natural healing from the perspective of someone with a chronic illness. And yeah, it’s Bill W. too, no matter what a bunch of fuck up anarchists/libertarians/punks say. (but that’s a whole ‘nother post)

And I think it might even be bigger than that. I mean, you’d have to talk about divisions between Southeast Michigan and the rest of the state, between the upper and lower penninsulas and who has access to “up north”.

But mostly I think it would start with not imposing any of our own assumptions about what people Need To Do to Purify Their Bodies. We’d have to stop thinking that our fat bodies or our disabled bodies or our work-in-the-food-service-industry bodies or our eating-taco-bell bodies need to be scourged, need to be disciplined.

Which is what I love about NADA and Community Accupuncture and also why I think it’s so important that Community Acupuncture practioners think of themselves as acpuncturists not as practitioners of allopathic medicine or TCM. Acupuncture is not a part of allopathic treatment or a subsector of TCM and insisting on a close relationship between the two gets in the way of the most important thing that acupuncture does: allow a person to realize in an amazing intuitive way their own capacity for healing. Now sure, later a person might decide to get tested for IBS or take some herbs to tonify their blood or whatnot (or, if you’re my mom, realize that water aerobics helps your sore shoulder).

Is this something inherent to acupuncture? Can it be inherent to the way people eat and move? How do we change the dialogue around health?

*not that I don’t adore both ANTM and potato chips